#needle in a haystack

Tagged needle in a haystack · show all articles

Three parallel long-context test rigs on one steel bench in a bright lab, each feeding waxed paper tape from a supply reel through its own reader head, one reel visibly further into its run than the other two

Context Window Size Versus What a Frontier Model Can Actually Recall From It

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google each publish a token count for how much a model can hold. Independent long-context benchmarks measure a different quantity: how much of it the model actually uses correctly, and the two numbers are routinely far apart.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 21 min read

A document-ingestion scanner in a bright test lab with one printed page caught mid-feed through its roller, curling as it is pulled from a tall stack beside it

Foundation Models

What Actually Happens Inside a Very Long Claude Context Window

Claude's context window now reaches a million tokens, but independent benchmarks that vary length, position, and lexical overlap show recall degrading well before the window fills — evidence the model's own maker now calls context rot.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 11, 2026 · 17 min read

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